Don't act like y'all don't know where we be neither.



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Showing posts with label Mississippi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mississippi. Show all posts

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Coffee. Black. Hold the Politics

I haven't spent a dime with Holiday Inn for at least 15 years..since whenever it was they decided to no longer fly the Mississippi state flag on their Mississippi properties.

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The state voted on it...and by a staggering majority(75%+) we, the state with the largest proportion of black folks in the country, voted to keep it.

Get over yourself...you're a low rent road-side motel with stupid television commercials.

You could call it race politics I guess, but it's not really about race. It's really about the insistent, sad and cloying U.S. need to be loved. They can't fathom that a group of people who, though they really don't deserve it, have the glorious privilege of being citizens of the United States of Uh-meeerica would still harbor separatist sentiments...that's all it is...FULL STOP.

Needy b****es.

Well I don't need to be loved (I'm well taken care of at the house thank you just the same)...

I NEED A CUP OF COFFEE!!!!

I've been in L'usiana all week workin'...with a co-worker who's trying to break the Guiness Book Record for loyalty points with Holiday Inn. So, here I am in one of their rooms...for now that is...until I need another cup of coffee. Then I'll be across the street (not a small feet when you're on Causeway in Metarie) at the curbstore standing in line behind 25 construction workers...all waiting to pay a buck fifty for a hot cup of bilge water marked Gourmet.


These morons have decided to remove the coffee pot from the lobby.

A motel without a coffee pot in the lobby!

Seriously...there's no coffee pot in the lobby.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Radio Grown Folks...Another Smokin' Installment

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Junior Kimbrough...Tramp


Jessie Mae Hemphill...Go Back to Your Used to Be



Asie Payton...I Love You



Y'all are welcome.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Last Month's Travels - The Delta

The Delta

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Greenwood, Mississippi home of Bobby Gentry...


(Hey Martha...sounds like she's eatin' dinner at noon...how could that be?)

among others...like the fella playin' guitar on this..



Hubert Sumlin playin one of the greatest lines of g'itar in the history of electricity.* It's also the home of Guitar Slim, and if you've never heard The Things That I Used To Do...you can find it on this blog. Flimsy Cups has ranked it at #9 on the all time list of Blues Songs.

You reckon anybody still plays the g'itar in Greenwood?
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Of course, when people think of the Delta...Clarkesdale is probably the first place that comes to mind. It's the home of the Delta Blues...the Blues that most people are familiar with. Robert Johnson and all that...the Crossroads are at Clarkesdale.

More importantly, to me, it's the home of Cat Head Records...maybe the best record store in the state.

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There was nothing 12 bar about the rythmic clang he was beating out of that old guitar. Cat Head has much more of Hill Country feel to it than Delta...afterall Hill Country blues is still alive and kicking. Besides Clarkesdale has always been more than Delta Blues...Sam Cooke's from there, Ike Turner, and John Lee Hooker. He learned to play from his uncle that had a one chord style very similar to what you find in the Hills.

Can't forget Tunica.**

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And we can't leave the Delta without some of this...

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These are the same fields that fed Liverpool when textiles were employing around 4 million Britons. If Eric Hobsbawm is to be believed (always a cautious proposition...even when he's not going out on a limb) this was the fuel for the engine that ran the British Empire in it's first phases.

Or this...

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* Howlin' Wolfe is actually from around West Point in the Columbus area...south of Tupelo and not far from where Tennessee Williams was born.

**The pictures of Cat Head and Tunica were taken last year, but better than anything I got on my last trip.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Last Weeks Travels - North/Hill Country

On Monday I headed north to Southaven.

Goin north from Jackson you don't really get out on the road 'til you clear Canton which is about 20 miles from the city limits. Then it's another 20-30 miles to the Lexington/Pickens exit where I take my first smoke break at an old truck-stop...

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oooops.

It's a cryin' shame too...one of the few honest truck-stops left on the road. The kinda place that sells bumper stickers and t-shirts, that say "I spent most of my money on women and booze..the rest I just wasted" or "It's not a Belly it's a Gas-Tank for a Love Machine"...little cedar boxes with a picture of Robert E. Lee on the lid...ashtrays and shot glasses decorated with Battle Flags, cut-glass figurines and dream catchers...rubber-band guns with clothes-pins for a firing mechanisms..

The bathrooms were down a long wood paneled hall...at the corner was one of those old cylindrical ashtrays, gun metal grey with a chrome top, under a pay phone...not much call for either of those these days. The bathrooms had cinder block walls and cement floors...no automated anything and it wasn't uncommon to find a bottle of dish-washing soap on the sink when the hand soap had run out.

Now it's gone. I'm sure to be replaced with another Love's or Flying J...fresh deli sandwiches, a mocachino machine, a Red Box and clean bathrooms. Yawn.
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Como Mississippi is a tidy little town just South of Senatobia and not too far from Southaven.

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It was the home of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Othar Turner...both legends of Hill Country Blues...a more rythmic, driving, get-down form than the kind that comes out of the Delta. McDowell is the undisputed king of the slide (Womm?) while Turner led the Drum and Fife tradition.

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That's from the Square at Holly Springs...another Hill Country Blues town. It's the home of Fat Possum Records, Junior Kimbrough and the irreplaceable, gigantic R.L. Burnside.



A man that looms larger in my own mind than William Faulkner and Elvis...both from the area.
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Those with a map may have noticed that we've skipped over Southaven and are half way to Tupelo.

Southaven is the Mississippi part of Memphis...there's lots of manufacturing and shipping because taxes are much lower in Mississippi. It's a pleasant livable place...there just isn't much to tell. There was work to be done and once I finished it I headed out...stopped in Holly Springs. Then on through New Albany to Tupelo.

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Tupelo, Mississippi the birthplace of Elvis Presely.

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That's the house where it all started...and they've turned it and a couple of acres around into a park. There's a gift shop and a museum, a chapel. Recently they brought over the Pentecostal Church he attended as a child. It's a lovely quiet spot in the same working class neighborhood where he was born.

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Tupelo is also the home of...

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There was trouble at the mall IMGP4187

And trouble with the internet connection in my room... 5252893117_bedf90836c_m
That's my perplexed to the point of irritation face...with shrapnel.

Y'all already know what happened the next day on the way back.

Flippin' Cops.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Road Trip - Gulf Coast

After a few days back from up north...I was on the road again.

This time headed south to the Mississippi Gulf Coast on business.

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A little beer and cigs store north of Saucier where I usually take a break...

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For those of you who don't live in the U.S., every state has it's own peculiar liquor laws. In Mississippi you can't buy cigarettes or beer at a package store (liquor store)...so a lot of times owners will set up a c-store next to their booze stand. You can usually get a moonpie or a pack of nabs in these places, but really they exist to sell cigarettes and beer. Dixieland, obviously, is just such a place.

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Did y'all know the Queen of England get's her hair did in Biloxi?

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Biloxi is really a pretty little place. There are still some empty lots here and there but...it's cleaned up real smart.

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They've done a nice job on this old building.

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The back door of Spanish Trail books...great collection of old Modern Library books. The owners a little touched maybe

"Do y'all sell mylar covers?"

"No..you know you can get mylar now and make your own."

Yeah well I reckon I could buy fabric and make my own pilla cases too, but...

Anyway, I picked up a clean copy of English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment by Chsisson.

Ocean Springs...just lovely, that's all.

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Reckon they'll sell you a cokecola in that place? Get you a pretty good cheeseburger and milkshake too I imagine.

I don't know how people live without havin live oaks around...

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An old spread headed out toward Pascagoula.

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Hard to think about it, but all these places were nearly erased five years ago...not because of a busted levy either, but a 30 ft. storm surge.

I did some business in between takin' my point and shoot pictures...then it was time to get on back...

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